Two charts that do not map cleanly
The target’s chart reflects a different business history. Mapping is a judgement exercise and it is the thing that determines whether consolidated reporting is meaningful.
By situation
Most acquisition integration plans allow six months for finance systems and then miss it, because the work turns out to be mapping decisions rather than technology. The first consolidated close after completion is when the gaps become visible — and it arrives in about four weeks, whether or not anyone is ready.
The situation
The target’s chart reflects a different business history. Mapping is a judgement exercise and it is the thing that determines whether consolidated reporting is meaningful.
You both buy from the same suppliers at different rates and may share customers. Nobody knows the overlap until the records are matched, and the pricing arbitrage is real money.
Shared services, management fees, and cross-selling begin before anyone has designed how they will be recorded and eliminated.
The target closes on day eighteen. Your board pack is due on day ten. That gap is the first visible integration failure and it is usually the loudest.
Revenue recognition treatment, capitalisation thresholds, and accrual conventions differ. Harmonising them affects reported earnings, so it is a decision with consequences rather than a cleanup.
Where consideration depends on the target’s performance, both sides need figures nobody disputes — which is much harder if the reporting was never integrated properly.
These get conflated and they have very different timelines. Reporting integration — getting the acquired company into your consolidated view with mapped accounts and eliminated intercompany — is achievable in three to five weeks and does not require touching the target’s ledger.
Systems integration — migrating them onto your platform — is a quarter or more and is frequently not worth doing in year one, when the management team is absorbing an acquisition and finance capacity is already stretched.
Doing the first without committing to the second gets you the board reporting you need immediately, and leaves the platform decision to be made on its merits once the business has settled.
One of the more reliably valuable exercises in the first month is matching vendor and customer records across both companies. Two businesses of similar size typically share more suppliers than either expects, at materially different rates.
That is immediate procurement leverage — consolidating onto the better contract — and it is invisible until the records are deduplicated. Shared customers matter too, both for credit exposure and because the combined relationship is usually worth more than either party was pricing.
Where the target capitalises something you expense, or recognises revenue on a different basis, harmonising changes reported earnings. That has consequences for earn-outs, for covenant calculations, and for how the deal looks a year later.
It should be an explicit decision made with your auditors, documented, and applied from a stated date — not something absorbed quietly during a mapping exercise. We surface these during integration and hand them to you rather than resolving them.
Where consideration depends on performance, the reporting has to be something the sellers will not dispute. A consolidated figure that traces to the target’s own transactions, computed on a stated basis, removes most of the argument. Assembling it in a spreadsheet invites the opposite.
Where to start
The target’s ledger, bank, and payroll. Nothing changes on their side and nobody has to stop working during a period when everyone is already unsettled.
Chart mapping with both controllers, vendor and customer matching across both companies, and a first look at the overlap. This is the decision-heavy part.
Intercompany identified and eliminated, consolidated statements produced with a variance report per period, and the policy differences surfaced explicitly.
With the reporting working and a shadow ledger running, the question of whether to migrate the target becomes a business case rather than an integration deadline.
Questions
Three to five weeks, read-only, with a variance report per period — and no commitment to migrating anything.